Some politicians are a God’s gift to cartoonists and snarky opinion writers – Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers, for one. The man looks like a fool, as well as acting like one. For years, I’ve dubbed him ‘Zippy the Pinhead’. He’s just dropped a new nickname in my lap: ‘Trillion Dollar Jim’.
The Albanese government will tip Australia’s total debt over $1 trillion for the first time on Thursday morning.
Who said this isn’t a government of achievements? If only the achievements weren’t so uniformly dire.
So, now more than one third of our GDP is swallowed up in debt – and it’s only getting worse. The interest bill alone is higher than even a Victorian government bribe to a corrupt union: $29.5 billion, rising to $42.2 billion over the next few years.
On Wednesday the Parliamentary Budget Office said in its annual fiscal monitor of federal and state governments that interest bills on debt were on the rise […] Andrew Lilley, the chief interest rate strategist at Barrenjoey, which helps the government sell debt, verified that the federal debt level would exceed $1 trillion on Thursday for the first time in Australian history.
The only problem with incompetent governments, though, is that we all end up paying for their idiocy.
This year there have been three domestic 0.25-percentage-point interest rate hikes, while financial markets put the chance of another hike before the end of the year at about 60 per cent.
Astonishingly, Trillion Dollar Jim actually thinks he’s doing a bang-up job.
In parliament on Wednesday Dr Chalmers said the country’s credit rating had been secured because of Labor’s debt management following the pandemic fiscal blow out.
“Moody’s, the second global ratings agency in the course of the last couple of weeks, reaffirmed Australia’s AAA credit rating and they did that because of the responsible way we have gone about managing a budget, getting gross debt down $200bn lower than we inherited and the trajectory that those opposite left us when we came to office,” the treasurer said.
And who said Labor didn’t understand the difference between gross and net debt?
They also seem to think we all have as short an attention span as they do:
Ahead of the 2022 election, Albanese and Chalmers used the “Coalition’s trillion-dollar debt bill” on repeat. They promised voters Labor would apply spending discipline. Labor’s 2022 manifesto, they said, was a “relatively modest offering” because an Albanese government would keep debt down.
Well, we can all see how that went: about as well as Albanese’s promise to reduce household electricity bills.
Trillion Dollar Zippy is also on track to win another dire record:
Treasury has forecast that Dr Chalmers will become Australia’s highest income-taxing treasurer since records were kept, driven by personal collections. Total income tax as a share of GDP will hit 18.6 per cent in 2026-27.
Record high taxes. Record high debt.
Tell me this isn’t a Labor government.
